Convert MyBook external hard drive to work with iMac

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I have an external hard drive that I bought when I had a windows PC. It has all of my music and a few file that I care about on it. My question is....Can I convert it, without losing all of my files, to be able to write to it with my iMac?
 

chscag

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If the MyBook is already formatted as FAT-32 it can be read and written to by your Mac. However, if the drive is formatted to NTFS your Mac can only read it. There is no way to non-destructively convert NTFS to a file system the Mac can read and write to. However, all is not lost. Just download Paragon NTFS from Paragon software ($19.95) and that will allow your Mac to read and write to it.

Here is the LINK.
 
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I believe there are freeware versions of what you are looking for to copy the data from your drive to your mac. Download NTFS for Mac OS X for Mac - Provides full read and write access to NTFS volumes. MacUpdate.com

Once this is done simply use disk utility, provided on your operating system and can be found in applications/utilities. Once here simply select your drive, ensuring it is connected to your mac, and select format ensuring that extended journaled is selected. Then Bob's your uncle your drive is now ready to be used with your mac, copy your files back and your good to go.
 

chscag

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Please read the reviews for the software you recommended. All freeware versions of NTFS drivers for the Mac are buggy. The only one that works right is the one I recommended above. Paragon NTFS.
 
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Please read the reviews for the software you recommended. All freeware versions of NTFS drivers for the Mac are buggy. The only one that works right is the one I recommended above. Paragon NTFS.

Well, if it is the same software you recommended you really cant critique the suggestion. However, my bad on being mistaken about it being freeware, that being said I have solved this problem in the past without spending any money Read AND Write NTFS Hard Drives Partitions on a Mac for Free - O'Reilly Digital Media Blog this solution is a bit outdated but certainly worth a try. I have used mac fuse for this in the past and worked fine and for your single use senario if you can get it to work reliably once, well that is enough. But who knows maybe this guy will say that I'm crazy. ;) Just thought I should a least provide a no cost solution.
 
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Well, if it is the same software you recommended you really cant critique the suggestion.

Why not? His experience is that Paragon is the only one he's encountered that works. I could give you my recommendation, which is that I wouldn't even bother with NTFS drivers, and simply use a natively writable filesystem.
 
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So I need to copy everything to my Mac and then reformat the external or will reformatting not work?
 
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Reformatting will work.
 
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trying to find answers that are linked...

I see this is about erasing and formatting so I thought I would jump in with a question...


Disk Erase failed with the error:

Invalid request.

is the message I get when I try to erase my NEW GoFlex 3TB USB2.0 external drive...

I have tried to partition... does not work... searched net for solutions but there is none. Well none that get me around the fact the drive seems like it cannot initialize.

Will zeroing out the data help... 22 hours apparenlty of zeroing?

or do I take this POS back?

Thanks
 

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